Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

It was pitch black when I arrived at Sihanoukville‘s port. A huge thunderstorm was brewing on the horizon, periodically lighting my surroundings. I had been dumped in a shabby area outside the central area of the port, where only a few boats were stationed. Noone I could see spoke any English. My motorbike driver had departed quickly, leaving me with no real certainty that this boat was actually going to take me to my destination – Koh Sdach. It’s a tiny island, home to only a few hundred people so boats rarely go there. My friend Sarah, who lives on…

Packed to the rafters with sweaty tourists, smelly luggage and excessive numbers of the driver’s children, we set off for Sihanoukville. It was crampt, hot and painful, but having a window seat allowed me to escape this torture for a few hours and enjoy the rolling Cambodian countryside. After a few hours, we rolled up to a large, sprawling hotel, whose managment decided not to advertise the name of their establishment on the outside or the inside of the buliding. As such, I had no idea where in Sihanoukville I actually was. When i tried to walk into the hotel’s…

In a word, Kampot was lovely. The weather was nice, the streets were calm, I saw some amazing sights, plus I was never abducted here. To start with, I checked into a hostel called Blissful, which was, indeed, eponymous. With a glass of beer, under the shade of a palm tree in a slowly swinging hammock, chatting to some new friends, I certainly felt a lot more bliss than in the past few days. After a somewhat sweaty night’s sleep, I woke excited and slightly apprehensively. This was because I had been persuaded, the day before, to rent a motorbike…

My visit to Phnom Penh started out as depressing as that of Ho Chi Minh. This was mainly due to the fact that I was abducted within minutes of getting into the city. It started out inoccuously enough. Walking out of my hostel, I turned right onto the short road, eventually meeting the river Mekong, which was a muddy, sprawling sight, but quite beautiful in the setting sun. I walked down the bank just a short way, when I heard a voice behind me saying “Hello there”. He introduced himself as a fellow traveler (from the Philippines). He seemed very nice, and…

Ho Chi Minh was the most depressing place I had visited in Asia so far. This came about, not becuase of any fault of the city itself, but from two external factors. These being the Vietnam War and the weather. I don’t want to equate these things as being of equal importance, obviously, but both contributed to my less-than-cheery mood while I was there. Things started off well enough. Getting off the bus in the early afternoon, the weather was nice, there wasn’t too much traffic about, and I had met a nice Vietnamese/American girl called Lawn, who bizarrely agreed…

Nha nha nha nha, nha nha nha nha, nha nha nha nha, nha nha nha nha, Nha-traaaang! (to the tune of Batman). Cough, anyway. Me and the two boys called Archie I adopted in Hue arrived in Nha Trang stupidly early in the morning. No hostel would have us, so we checked into a very fancy hotel with towels and showers and AC and TVs. The only problem with it was that it only had one double bed. Not wanting to get arrested, I offered to sleep on the floor on the duvet, which was actually quite comfortable. It was…

From this point on, this blog will mention two guys named Archie a lot. We were all now taking the same route down Vietnam, and at about the same pace. They like to joke that I was stalking them, tracking them down whereever they went. But really, I felt sorry for them, these two poor gap year kids, with noone to look after them. I would take on the role of parent and guardian, helping them keep safe and teaching them my pearls of traveling wisdom. I was definitely not stakling them because I had noone else to talk to….

Night buses are vehicles designed to give one something this is almost,but not quite, entirely unlike a good night’s sleep. I hadn’t been in a night bus before, so didn’t know what to expect. What i found was three rows of double decker beds, built for people of a height about 5 inches shorter than I. Legs had to be squeezed into tiny plastic boxes below the bed in front. The lack of leg room and bed space, no light for reading, and a very poorly-made toilet in the back made for one of my worst, and longest, nights travel…

I’m going to lay my cards down early and say, Dear Reader, that this blog post isn’t likely to be that interesting as I did hardly anything in Hanoi. So if you want to stop reading now, I won’t mind too much. I’m not being self-depricating or modest – I know how awesome my other travelogues have been – so please, do save your self the trouble and read something else. Ok, well, I arrived in Hanoi on my first ever propeller propelled passenger plane (say that eating a plate of peas). As usual, I hadn’t done any research into this place….

The tuktuk drive to Kuang Si Waterfalls was in complete contrast to the serene and peaceful atmosphere I was about to encounter. Bowel-wrenching might be a good way of describing the reckless journey round blind corners and along steep, rocky hillsides. Thirty minutes of begging the gods to save me, we arrived safe and nearly sound at the entrance to the forest which houses the waterfalls. The first thing that greeted me, walking into the dense foliage, was a dozen Malaysian Sun Bears. Luckily, they were asleep and behind a wire mesh enclosure. Continuing on, I got my first glimpse…